


Arcadia

by Nagisa



Category: Changeling: the Dreaming
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-10
Updated: 2014-06-10
Packaged: 2018-02-04 04:23:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1765324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nagisa/pseuds/Nagisa
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Frustrating thoughts about an old home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Arcadia

Sometimes, it seems as though ages have passed. Sometimes, it’s peeking over my shoulder like it was yesterday. It haunts my dreams, which are often difficult to differentiate from my waking thoughts anyway. Sometimes it is beautiful, waves and waves of green and gold grass, high spires of iridescent glass reaching into the sky. The ground is silver, glamour dances in the air and no one can be sad. Other times, more often, there are screams in the air, glittering towers falling to the ground, crashing and shattering as chaos takes over, spreading across the land. No one is safe, and there is nowhere to hide. Nightmare creatures growl in the distance, but they grow ever closer, and one day they will be upon you.  
  
Arcadia. My home. Even now, years and years since I left that world, picking my way along the silver path until I emerged from the Dreaming, I can’t pick out one clear picture of Arcadia in my mind. The mists that shroud each of our minds against the memory is so strong. I don’t know what is real, and what is a strange fabrication as my mind tries to make sense of why I would leave in the first place. I wish to return, but the way is long shut, even if I could remember exactly where it is.  
  
For the longest time, I couldn’t even remember my own name. Although I made my way to Earth, and I found a way to protect myself from the banality of this world, I knew nothing. It was as though I was born anew, the mists even somehow able to conceal the fact that I was a fae for a short time.   
But even then I could see it. In my dreams, the spires stretched high, reflecting the light of the Dreaming into my soul. I thought I was crazy. How could I remember an impossible place? And back then, I was so certain that it couldn’t be a mere fabrication of my imagination. I saw these things in my dreams because they were real. It was only as I grew older, and the other pictures began to reveal themselves that I questioned it. When my subconscious wandered, and I came back bewildered and afraid, I began to realize that perhaps Arcadia wasn’t the paradise I had always believed.  
  
We were among the last to leave, I had come to learn. The noble Sidhe, the shining host. I was called Madcyn, of the House Fiona, and I had a brother, though he was lost during the journey out of the Dreaming. Maybe that is why I have these scenes in my head, at all times, never ending. Something has happened to Arcadia, and that’s why we ran. But what?  
  
I have made friends, mostly commoners. My best friends are a Nocker and a Pooka, and neither of them remember ever seeing Arcadia. They had never left Earth, and every time I remember that, I feel a twinge of guilt, although it wasn’t that I personally abandoned them. We all had. The noble hosts of the Sidhe, who ran into Arcadia and shut the doors behind us as soon as banality began to wash over the world. We left the common fae to fend for themselves, and by the time we returned, they had learned to live without us.   
I was lucky. I was late, and the War had ended by the time I found my way out. And even so, many commoners still feel the burn. I am not welcome immediately, in a lot of places. I must work to gain trust. But they don’t understand that I hurt as well. That I don’t want to subjugate them. I don’t want them to bow to me. I only want to return to Arcadia, and find my home again. They don’t understand the pain of knowing that it is there, and how beautiful and amazing it all was. They don’t understand the pain of knowing that it is there, and that we can never, ever return.

And most of all, they don’t understand the pain and confusion of knowing all of this, of having it all in your head, being unable to fully exist in the present, because something tugs your soul to that past, and not even knowing how much of it is real.


End file.
